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Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.

Alain Badiou

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Alain Badiou
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: January 17
Editor
Mathematician
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Sociologist
University Teacher
New Sallee
Impossible
Situation
Possible
Politics
Within
Declared
Making
Precisely
Seems
Consists
Always
Seem

More quotes by Alain Badiou

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Those who have nothing have only their discipline.
Alain Badiou
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To believe that the intolerable crime is to burn a few cars and rob some shops, whereas to kill a young man is trivial, is typically in keeping with what Marx regarded as the principal alienation of capitalism: the primacy of things over existence, of commodities over life and machines over workers
Alain Badiou
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There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.
Alain Badiou
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Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement. Politics is enthusiasm with a collective with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism.
Alain Badiou
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The ethic of truth is the complete opposite of an 'ethics of communication'. It is an ethic of the Real The ethic of truth is absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general.
Alain Badiou
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In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.
Alain Badiou
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We know that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and 'natural' character of the most monstrous inequalities.
Alain Badiou
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We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.
Alain Badiou
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A Truth is the subjective development of that which is at once both new and universal. New: that which is unforeseen by the order of creation. Universal: that which can interest, rightly, every human individual, according to his pure humanity.
Alain Badiou
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Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests.
Alain Badiou
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I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.
Alain Badiou
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If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it's narcissistic. You don't connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them.
Alain Badiou
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Love is not a contract between two narcissists.
Alain Badiou
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These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television, but more subtly the written press, are quite spectacular powers of unreason and ignorance.
Alain Badiou
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What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.
Alain Badiou
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It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of 'there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties'), thereof one must be silent. It must on the contrary be named.
Alain Badiou
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Without mathematics, we are blind.
Alain Badiou
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It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.
Alain Badiou
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I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics...that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.
Alain Badiou
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The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.
Alain Badiou